Copycat

Reading the Spinworks manual I stumbled across this accusation:

"It appears that another NMR processing package has also added HOGWASH processing (after being included in SpinWorks) and copied SpinWorks HOGWASH dialog box almost exactly."

my comment:
(1) I don't know this HOGWASH, but common sense tells me that it doesn't work (it's already 20 years old: if it really worked, everybody would be already using it today).

(2) From the point of view of the user it would be a dream if all programmers were copycats. Once you have familiarized with a program you have learned them all. One of the reasons why NMR software is so bad is that NMR programmers refuse to copy the good ideas of their colleagues.

I have asked the colleagues if they could recognize the accused program. The copycat himself (I don't want to disclose the name today) came out and wrote for this blog:

"I have to admit he's right. I had found HOGWASH in an article and I decided to implement it (mainly for fun), I googled just to see if there was any implementation available out there, and I found SpinWorks. So I used the information contained within the manual and its user interface as a reference. My only intention at that time was to improve my knowledge on NMR data processing techniques, that’s it. It only took me a couple of hours but soon I realized that the technique is not useful, and I wanted to get rid of it from the program. Unfortunately, I never did it, because of the lack of time but mostly because I forgot about it."

For a random example of a nonconformist:
http://www.aethro-kinematics.com/w11_steveX.html